August 8, 2012
The Ghost Hunters
Time for bed and a big day tomorrow. Nothing drastic to report. I’ve been ghost hunting all day.
capturing photographs from the microscope with the computerized camera
Most things that live on planet Earth go extinct without leaving a fossil behind.
Today I’ve been ghost hunting. I’m searching microscope slides for pieces of ancient sponges that have been almost entirely obliterated by time and minerals.
It’s hard enough to even begin to preserve microscopic glass needles from a squishy sea floor sponge. Then the sediments became rocks, got buried under kilometers of other rocks, got cooked by contacting hot volcanic eruptions, and got uplifted and exposed in the enormous Andes mountains. A lot goes on during 201,300,000 years!
Maybe I’ll find more, and maybe I won’t. Either way, Friday we head to the Andes to look for fossils. I want to know what the marine ecology looked like on the shores of Pangea after a mass extinction. It’s not like I expect this to be easy. It’s time travel, and ghost hunting. I’m a Greek myth right now!